[Jeffhs]

I didn't realize, either, that Audition made tube-powered radios. I remember the Audition radios being sold at a Woolworth store near my hometown years ago, but all those sets were solid state.

I had a feeling that this radio had been made in Japan, because of the very small transistor-radio speakers being used as tweeters and the larger ones as low-frequency transducers. As to the brand, I wasn't making the connection at first, but the TEN/RICAN tubes in the set should have been an immediate and unmistakable tipoff that the radio was manufactured by Fujitsu-Ten. I don't know, however, where the Rican fits in.

I'm at a loss to explain why this set uses two 12DT8 tubes in the FM front end, but I'll throw out a guess or two. The first thing that comes to mind is that the second 12DT8 may be a dummy tube, put in just to inflate the tube count and to have the buyer believe he or she was buying a super-sensitive radio, when in reality only one of the tubes was actually working. Another possibility is that the second 12DT8 is an RF amp/converter tube for the AM section, but I don't believe a radio this new would have an RF stage on AM. That stage was dropped from most AM radios after about the '50s, when 50kW AM stations started up in major cities, and smaller towns, miles (in some cases hundreds of miles) from large cities were putting up 250- or 500-watt local-service dawn-to-dusk stations. As these smaller stations became popular, the days of AM-only radios with RF stages were indeed numbered; therefore, I seriously doubt (though it is possible) that a radio made in the early to mid sixties would have such a stage ahead of the antenna. Even respected companies such as Zenith had done away with the AM RF stage by then. The C845 was made and marketed for the 1959-60 model year, with the MJ-1035 series following and being marketed between roughly 1961 and 1965 (both of which had AM as well as FM RF stages), but I have a feeling that these sets were among the last to use such stages, due to the higher operating power (generally 25 or 50kW) of big-city stations, and the increasing popularity by this time of low-power small-town/suburban daytime stations.